Popularity of video surveillance systems has increased over the last several years. Such popularity increase can be attributed, at least in part, to advancements in video technology, reduction in price of video cameras, as well as increase in video storage capacity. For instance, many consumer-level video cameras can generate relatively high resolution video data, and such cameras often are equipped with hard drives that can be used to retain several hours of video data. Furthermore, even if a video camera is not equipped with a hard drive, the video camera can be placed in communication with a data store (e.g., by way of a firewire cable) and video data can be directed to the data store for short-term or long-term storage. Thus, capturing video and storing video are relatively inexpensive.
Compensating a human being, however, to monitor video data captured by a surveillance camera remains costly. For instance, many retail stores have video surveillance cameras that transmit video to a control room that includes multiple display screens, such that video from different surveillance cameras are provided to different display screens. One or more human beings monitor the display screens in search of suspicious or illegal activity and dispatch a security officer to a particular location if suspicious or illegal activity is observed on one of the display screens. Use of a human, however, is expensive, as a retail store must compensate the human being that is monitoring the display screens. Furthermore, a brief lapse in concentration can result in misappropriation of valuable goods.
Accordingly, systems have been developed that can be used to analyze video data and automatically determine particular actions that are being undertaken by an individual in the video data. Such systems, however, are generally inefficient to operate and difficult to train.